Recent reviews by Guy Humual

I don't really play borderlands games with other people, so if that's what you do your mileage may vary but as a stand alone game, which I played for the story, this game is bad. Extremely unsatisfying story. Cut scenes were you're completely locked out and powerless it made me feel like I was playing a side character while all the NPCs had an epic story happen to them. This might not have been completely horrible if those NPCs you were a side character to weren't an annoying spoiled brat but it's hard to be a side character to a main hero you hate more than the main villains.

Pros: The puzzles weren't that cryptic or obtuse, a few minutes of thinking usually gets you though, and for a few there are subtle hints in the game

The story is fun

You're playing an idiot which is a fun change from the usual wise cracking protagonist, and a perfect fit for a hero that might try handing an apple core to a scientist who asked you for something to eat.

The time traveling aspect is quite cool and sometimes hard to pull off in a game, but I feel it's been done right in this game.

Cons: The game is pretty sort, I was able to complete it in three hours and I'm not sure there's much re-playablity.

Short as it was there were a few scenes that I felt were only there to stretch out the run time.

Conclusion: I think this is a great game to entertain you for an afternoon if you can get it for cheap. If you can get it for the price of renting a movie I think it's good value. I'm not sure I could recommend it if it's going to cost more because I don't think there's much replayability here.

This is the best of the modern first person fallout games, a well written game, set in a complex world with many competing factions. The action is actually a secondary interest, it's still a fun shooter, but the story and setting are the primary interests, you'll love to explore and meet new people. You'll probably be so wrapped up in the story that it won't even bug you a bit with how they say Caesar.

This game is what GTA wishes it was. This is the best game in the series, the 2nd made some incredible advances in character development, and the 4th may have gone a bit too over the top, but Saints Row: The Third is the perfect mix of game play, over the top action, story, and the best part is you can make your own character. Great cast, outrageous missions, and some villains fantastic villains. I would recommend this game over any GTA game since San Andreas

This game is complete and utter trash, you need to be online to access it's core elements in Mycarrier (the only thing I was actually interested in playing in this game), the controls are buggy, game play is so unbelievably bad (unless your a masochist and enjoy losing I suppose), and I struggle to think of any redeeming qualities. I picked this game up for $20 and I feel as though I was ripped off.

This is almost a good game. When I first played this game, back when it first came out, it was plagued with bugs and it was very easy to say this game wasn't worth playing. There are a lot of fan made fixes these days, even a lot of restored content and so my decision to not recommend this game is much harder.

What makes me hesitate is the story, there are great characters in this, great back stories, but sadly there are aspects of the story that fail badly and they are partly to blame for me not recommending this. This is a long epic game, you'll get a lot of game time out of this, but the endings are . . . well, the pay off just insn't there IMO. KotoR had a great pay off with an epic fight with a villain you'd grown to hate, KotoR 2 has multiple bosses, including one that nears Darth Malak, but they pay off just isn't there. I didn't feel any satisfaction from defeating this foe. If anything I felt annoyed at my lack of choices.

Another terrible aspect of the game is that it forces you to play NPC characters. The first hour of the game, which I'm including the tutorial, you'll be playing as a T3 droid more than your own character. I made a character that's supposed to represent me. That's who I should play. That's who I want to play. Sadly, not only are you repeatedly forced to play NPCs, made to include them in your group for certain sections (something KotoR did, but I liked all of those NPCs so it never seemed a pain), and that leads to another flaw in the game: the narrative isn't being told from your character's perspective. Because you're playing as NPCs, getting cut scenes with NPCs talking amongst themselves, you've given this disjointed narrative that makes the story far far less immersive. I'll give an example:

Fairly early in the story there's a light side quest that has you breaking into the mainframe of an evil cooperation, and there's an option to use a protocol droid to do it. Naturally the game makes you play as the protocol droid. However this mission intersects with a side mission where you're hunting bounties on two escaped criminals, and somehow this droid, who's only been in your group for this mission, who wasn't party to any of the bounty hunter mission, instantly recognises the two criminals and you're forced to choose between two dialogue options where you recognise the two and demand that they stop. Both flee instantly. Then you go on with the rest of your mission. How does the droid know they were wanted criminals? How do you learn they escaped to the planet surface? None of these questions have an in game answer and so you're forced to think about it out of the game which is not good for the whole immersion thing.

However, those problems have nothing on the biggest most terrible flaw in the game: the influence system. Let me just say that if this system had worked it would have been amazing, the ability to make good characters bad, make evil characters good, it would be a player's dream, but ultimately the way it works is that your player is the one who has to change to gain influence with the NPCs. You have to act how the NPC wants, choose dialogue that they like so that you can gain influence with them. It's a backwards system. It's more like they're influencing you to appease them. You want to play a good character? Well there are NPCs that you simply can't bring with you. Want to be evil? Well don't bring any good NPCs on missions with you or you're going to lose influence.

One last point on NPCs: I really liked most, we had some return from the first game, the two droids, and one other who I won't spoil, but most of the new ones were pretty fun. Bao-Dur, on the other hand, is one of the most horribly voiced NPCs I've ever had forced on me in any RPG game I've ever played. You end up with this grating monotone NPC fairly early and even though I was a light side character I instantly wanted to force choke him to death. Sadly we're forced to play this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ a number of times throughout the game. Another problem with the NPCs is that two of the NPCs join based on the gender of the PC you pick, if you're male you get the awesome Handmaiden of Atris, a kick ass character who has tons of fan art and pages of information on, if you're female you get some dude called "the Disciple" . . . a character so bland that even wookipedia could barely write three pages on. Darth Vader's glove, a Mandalorian Crushgaunt has more information on it. Speaking of wookipedia, the gender, name, and appearance of the PC was added (because wookipedia needs pages and pages of pointless information) and the exile, your character, is supposed to be female. Which means the Handmaiden should accompany you, but the game has very ridged romance story lines written into the game and same sex romances were strictly forbidden.

And one final note: there are a ton of powers added to the game. The original KotOR had a lot of power selection, but this game has tons more! The only problem though is that at the higher levels I found a power I liked, force push, and found that it was more than effective for nearly every encounter afterwards. Having a lot of choice isn't that useful when you only need one answer.

KotOR is my favorite Star Wars game ever. This game is likely being unfairly compared to that classic, and admittedly if this were a standalone game I might even have given it a reluctant recommendation but the fact that it bares the KotOR name forces me to not recommend this game, the first one was so much better, and two is too much of a mess for me to recommend. However, I will say that it's far from the worst Star Wars game I've ever played and if you're a rabid fan you really can't go wrong at the price the game is currently selling at. Even bad games might be worth playing at that price, and, it's worth noting that there is a moding community and there have been changes and restored content add via fan made mods. The choice added back into the game from these mods would allow me to recommend the game if they were part of the initial release so with that in mind, and if you don't have any fears of modifying your game, it's worth picking up if you like RPGs or Star Wars. I can't justify giving a thumbs up to a game that I needed to modify to enjoy however, so while I can't recommend the game as is, there is a relatively decent game once modified to something playable.